Starve the Ego
Category: Commonplace
Quotes, art, questions, videos, podcasts, music, and whatever else inspires.
The Day After Christmas
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Self-Destroying
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.”
— Arthur C. Clarke (via Dense Discovery)
Winter Solstice
The Movement of the Stars
Observe the movement of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Year in Review
A Psychological Quark
I write because…well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quark of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have.”
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
Big Snow
Hit Em Where It Hurts
Sunshine, bathe me, lately life’s been crazy
Your Eyes, tell all, we outside with it, your call
Move me, Need Me, care about it, breath deep
You see, what I miss, holdin on to ya with a tight grip
Light Lit, no cap, heart spilled all over the Floor mat
Tongue out, I don’t know how to hold that
Nowadays I don’t really want to hold back
So I hit em where it hurts
So I hit em where it hurts, (Set sail, lighthouse, Search)
Sever the Sightlines
[S]haming has social meaning. It characteristically results in a desire to sever the sightlines between the self and the other. We talk about wanting to hide our faces and the characteristic look of shame—the head bowed, the eyes lowered. But that’s not the only way of achieving such separation. Rather than hide, one can instead do away with the onlooker. ‘He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,’ as Erik Erikson famously put it (1963, 227).
— Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Lisa Marie Blair 